The Other End of the Line

by Andrea Camilleri

  “If you don’t need me anymore, I’d like to go back home and get ready to take Leena to the hospital.”

  “Thank you, Meriam. You’ve been a tremendous help, and I’m sure you’ll be even more of a help to the girl. One last thing: Since you’ll be needing to sleep, I can inform the tailor’s that you won’t be coming in today, if you want.”

  “Thank you, but I think I’ll be able to go to work. Signora Elena is very understanding. I’m sure that when she finds out what happened, she’ll be the first to give Leena a brand-new dress as a present.”

  “Okay, thanks again,” said Montalbano, standing up and shaking her hand.

  Meriam went out.

  “And now,” the inspector said to Fazio, “we start making some phone calls. You ring Sileci and explain the situation to him. The little girl is going to the hospital. Ask him to send a car to take the three migrants to the center. The other two will remain in detention here with us. And now I’m going to wake up the prosecutor and tell him the whole story.”

  * * *

  Two hours later, the two boatmen were picked up and taken to prison in Montelusa. The matter was now out of the inspector’s hands.

  “Shall I set Pagliarello and Pasanisi free?” asked Fazio.

  “Yes, and you, too, go and get a few hours of sleep.”

  “Why don’t you do the same yourself?”

  “Because I don’t think I’d be able to sleep,” said Montalbano.

  “Suit yourself,” said Fazio, going out.

  But the inspector couldn’t stand the thought of staying at the station any longer.

  He felt the need to chase from his mind the scenes of the past few days: the drowned boy, the crucified flautist, the raped young girl, all those eyes staring at him from the motorboat . . .

  His discipline as a cop allowed him to do what he had to do, but his soul as a man was having trouble bearing the weight of all this tragedy.

  Going back to signing papers to distract himself just wouldn’t cut it anymore, and walking along the dock of the port, where by this point he saw ghosts, wouldn’t help him, either.

  And so he did something he had never imagined he would do.

  He left the station on foot and headed for the nearest church.

  He went in.

  It was completely empty.

  He went and sat down on a bench and started looking at the statues of saints, which were all made of wood and had the faces of peasants and fishermen. The biggest of all was the statue of the black saint, San Calò. Who could say? It was possible that the saint, too, had arrived on these shores on a barge.

  There was a sudden explosion of sound. Somebody had sat down at the organ.

  He recognized the piece. It was the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, by Bach.

  He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and breathed deeply, letting his chest and heart expand as the music carried him far, far away.

  He waited for the organist to finish.

  Then he left the same way he’d come in, and went to the Caffè Castiglione.

  “A custard cream puff and a double espresso, please.”

  Now he could go back to the office and sign papers.

  * * *

  At the office he found Augello fresh as a rose in early morning. Feeling envious, he secretly hoped that Mimì’s turn at the docks would be complicated and difficult.

  He then told him in precise detail everything that had happened, and afterwards said he’d decided that, since he’d lost most of a night’s sleep, Mimì should take his place that evening. Augello then asked if he could call him during the night if need be.

  “Absolutely!” said Montalbano, thinking in his mind that not only would he unplug the land line, he would also turn off his cell phone.

  Reassured, Mimì went back to his office. The inspector passed the time till lunch break by signing no fewer than two hundred different documents, then headed off to Enzo’s trattoria. Despite the midmorning cream puff, he was even hungry.

  “Inspector, would you like some migrants’ soup?”

  “Enzo, please, no. Don’t talk to me about migrants. What’ve you got that’s good, really good?”

  “If you don’t want fish as a first course, I’ve got a delicious cannicciola.”

  “And what’s this cannicciola?”

  “They’re little Trapanese macaroni with cabbage and potatoes. My wife invented the dish.”

  “Well, I do always trust your wife’s cooking.”

  The cannicciola was breathtaking.

  He made up for his betrayal of the fish realm by ordering a dish of mullet cooked in salt for his second course. This, too, was excellent.

  When leaving the restaurant he felt a little weighed down, thus necessitating a stroll along the jetty, despite what ghosts this might awaken.

  Walking along at a slow pace, one lazy step at a time, he reached the lighthouse.

  Sitting down beneath it, he fired up a cigarette and, looking around, he realized how much the port had changed.

  Both the dock and the arm of the jetty he was on had been divided into so many sections marked by barriers. Seen from a distance, they looked like some kind of labyrinth. He quite logically thought that in any case, such temporary barriers were better than walls and barbed wire, as so many other European countries were contemplating.

  “And what do you think of the European Union?” he asked a crab that was looking at him from the rock beside the one he was sitting on.

  The crab did not reply.

  “Would you rather not compromise yourself? All right, then, I will compromise myself instead. I think that after the great dream of this unified Europe got off the ground, we’ve done everything within our power to destroy its very foundations. We’ve blown off the lessons of history, politics, and basic economics. The only idea that seemed to remain intact was that of peace. Because after killing one another for centuries on end, we couldn’t stand it any longer. But now we’ve forgotten that, too, and so we’ve come up with this fine excuse of migrants for putting old and new borders of barbed wire back up. They tell us there are terrorists hiding among these migrants instead of telling us that these poor bastards are fleeing from terrorists.”

  The crab, rather than state its opinion, slid into the water and disappeared.

  * * *

  When Montalbano returned to the station, Catarella informed him that Dr. Cosma had called. As soon as he sat down he gave him a ring.

  “I just wanted to tell you,” Dr. Osman began, “that I’m feeling better and I’m available if you need me tonight.”

  Fazio and Augello returned shortly thereafter.

  Montalbano told Augello what Osman had just said.

  “Dammit!” Mimì exclaimed.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Fazio told me how beautiful and clever this Meriam is!”

  “What, Mimì? Are you already licking your chops over her?”

  At that moment Sileci butted in with his usual phone call.

  “Tonight, round about midnight, as usual, we’ve got more than three hundred people coming in. I’ve already informed everyone. The more men you can send, the better. We’ll all meet up at the port tonight.”

  “What’s the greatest number of men we can muster?” Montalbano asked Fazio.

  “What do you want me to say, Chief? If we squeeze really hard, we can come up with a dozen, half of whom, over the last week alone, have only managed to sleep every other night.”

  “Never mind, Fazio. We’ll just grit our teeth and do our best.”

  “Okay, then, we’ll leave it that if I need you, I’ll give you a call,” said Augello.

  “I already told you that wouldn’t be a problem, Mimì. Meanwhile you should think about informing Osman.”

  The meeting was adjourn
ed.

  * * *

  As soon as he set foot in his house, Montalbano’s first thought was to call Livia.

  Livia wanted him to tell her, in full detail, the whole story of the girl who was raped.

  Montalbano would have liked to have been spared this, but he knew that his girlfriend would never let him off the hook if he failed to tell her.

  When they’d finished talking, he unplugged the phone and turned off his cell. Then he went into the kitchen to see what Adelina had cooked up for him.

  He opened the refrigerator: empty.

  Full of hope, he ran to the oven, opened it, and felt his heart sink.

  Empty.

  Had Adelina lost her mind?

  Had she forgotten to make him dinner?

  What was he going to do now?

  He had no desire whatsoever to go out of the house and back to Enzo’s. The only solution was to fry an egg and eat a little bread and tumazzo cheese.

  It was only when he put a small frying pan with olive oil over the burner, frowning and cursing all the while, that he noticed a covered pot on the stove, giving off a pleasant aroma.

  He froze, slowly reached out with one hand, seized the lid, and raised it a little.

  The fragrance grew stronger.

  A heartwarming scent of baccalà.

  Removing the small skillet, he lifted the lid on the pot and looked inside.

  Baccalà with passuluna olives.

  He started to warm it on a low flame, then went and opened the French door to the veranda. Given the nice weather, he set the table outside.

  Then, instead of putting the baccalà on a plate, he took the whole pot outside.

  It took him quite a while to finish, because he savored every bite.

  Then he cleared the table, went into the bathroom, then lay down in bed, closed his eyes, and immediately reopened them.

  Something had occurred to him. He chased it from his thoughts at once and closed his eyes again.

  But his eyelids seemed to have some kind of spring mechanism. They immediately came open again. And the worry of a moment before returned.

  Changing position, he managed to close his eyes again.

  One second later, they bugged open yet again, and he realized he would never be able to sleep until he did what he had to do.

  Getting out of bed, he went into the dining room and plugged the phone back in.

  Ten minutes later, he was in a deep sleep.

  6

  Entering headquarters, he immediately asked Catarella:

  “Any news about last night’s landing?”

  “Nah, Chief. Ya know wha’ they say: No nooz is goo’ nooz.”

  “Who’s on the premises?”

  “Jess Fazio.”

  “Send him to me.”

  The phone seemed to have waited for him to open the door to his office to start ringing.

  “Ahh, Chief, ’ere’d be the signura Marianna Ucrìa onna line an’ she wants a talk t’yiz poissonally in—”

  “Put her on,” said Montalbano, cutting him off.

  “Good morning, Meriam, what can I do for you?”

  “Good morning, Inspector, I’m calling on behalf of Signora Elena. She would like you to confirm today’s appointment.”

  “Confirmed. How is Leena?”

  “I dropped in at the hospital to say hello to her this morning and they told me she’ll be released at noon. Inspector Sileci will come and pick her up in his car and take her to the processing center.”

  “How did she seem to you?”

  “Physically she’s all right, but she’d had a bad night. Apparently she had one nightmare after another and was unable to get any rest. I’ll have a better sense of things this afternoon, since I promised I’d come back and see her before noon.”

  “Thank you, Meriam.”

  He hung up, and at that moment Fazio came in and sat down in the chair opposite the desk. Montalbano noticed he looked more run-down than usual.

  “You look like someone who’s lost a night’s sleep. Insomnia?”

  “What do you mean, ‘insomnia’! I’d just fallen into a blissful sleep when Inspector Augello rang me to lend him a hand.”

  “Why, what happened?”

  “Chief, that motorboat looked like a kindergarten. There were about fifteen little children aboard. Then, as soon as they began to disembark, the power went out. A couple of kids came down in the dark, while the others waited on the boat. When the lights came back on five minutes later and we were able to count the children, there was one missing, a four-year-old. His mother started wailing like the Virgin Mary at the foot of the Cross. So, while everyone was looking for him around the docks to no avail, Inspector Augello called me up to tell me to get there at once and lead a search team. Dr. Osman and me wasted a good hour without any result, when a sailor called out from the patrol boat and told us to stop the search because they’d found the boy, who’d somehow ended up in the engine room. By the time I got back home I couldn’t fall asleep anymore.”

  “Well,” said Montalbano, “at least everything turned out all right.”

  “But there’s a huge problem, Chief!” Fazio continued.

  “And what’s that?”

  “The problem is that our guys working on the disembarkments are starting to grumble. There’s a lot of bad feeling going around, and they’re not entirely wrong, ’cause you can’t ask a guy who’s spent a whole day on the job at the station to lose a night’s sleep helping out Sileci.”

  “But,” the inspector objected, “his own men are in the same situation.”

  “No, you’re wrong there,” said Fazio. “Sileci has twenty men at his disposal. One night ten of them work and ten of them sleep, and the next night they switch places. Sileci’s men take turns. Our guys are always the same.”

  Montalbano sat there in silence.

  Then he grabbed the receiver and told Catarella to ring Hizzoner the C’mishner for him.

  “I, for one,” Fazio went on, “at the present moment, just to give you an example, wouldn’t be able to tell a corpse from a living man.”

  The phone rang.

  “Montalbano! This is the commissioner. What can I do for you?”

  “Excuse me just a second,” said the inspector.

  He set the phone down, stood up, and started shouting angrily.

  “And no more arguing, for Christ’s sake! I don’t want to hear another word about this! All of you get out of here and close the door behind you!”

  As Fazio was looking at him with his eyes popping out of his head, not understanding what was happening, Montalbano threw down his ace, slamming his hand on the desk and yelling:

  “I said close the goddamn door!”

  Then he sat back down, picked up the receiver, and said:

  “I apologize, Mr. Commissioner, but—”

  “What on earth is going on?” Bonetti-Alderighi asked in alarm, having heard the whole routine.

  “What’s going on is that my ten men lending support to Sileci are at the end of their rope. They haven’t slept a wink in days, and so they came to my office to protest.”

  The word “protest” alarmed the commissioner even more.

  “Listen, Montalbano, if you want, I can come to Vigàta myself to talk to—”

  “No, no, Mr. Commissioner,” the inspector interrupted him (all he needed now was Bonetti-Alderighi in his hair!), “please don’t bother, it’s something I can deal with myself. But I assure you, sir, we can’t go on this way.”

  “I realize that,” said the commissioner. “You have no idea how hard I am trying to get you some reinforcements, but at the ministry they just turn a deaf ear. All the same, there does lately seem to be a ray of hope.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Apparently over the la
st few days the boatmen have changed routes. Now they seem to be aiming for the Greek islands. If this turns out to be true, there’ll be a lot less pressure on us.”

  Poor Greeks, thought Montalbano. Like throwing a drowning man a boulder. He kept that thought to himself and asked:

  “And if it turns out not to be true?”

  “If it’s not, in three days we’ll hold a meeting to work out what we can do. Carry on, Inspector.”

  And he hung up.

  Fazio, who’d heard the whole conversation over the speakerphone, threw up his hands.

  “Let’s hope the guys can hold up for two more days . . . But if you ask me, it’s always the same: The shears fly into the air and end up in the gardener’s asshole . . .”

  * * *

  The inspector was about to get up and go to Enzo’s for lunch when the goddamn telephone rang again.

  “Ahh, Chief, ’at’d be yer goilfrenn, Miss Livia, ’oo—”

  “Put her on.”

  He got worried. Normally Livia never called him at the office.

  “Livia, what is it?”

  “It’s nothing, don’t worry. I just wanted to remind you that today at three—”

  “They’ve already reminded me, thanks,” Montalbano retorted with irritation.

  Livia made the mistake of insisting.

  “So I needn’t worry?”

  Montalbano decided to make her pay for this phone call.

  “At any rate there wasn’t even any need for them to remind me. How could I forget a woman like Elena?”

  “Just being an asshole, as usual,” said Livia, who immediately understood his game.

  * * *

  When he got to Enzo’s the place was almost empty.

  “Inspector, my wife made some pasta that’s really quite something . . .”

  “No first course!” the inspector said firmly.

  He immediately recoiled in shock. Why on earth had he said that? Then he realized that he’d said it out of pure and simple vanity. A burst of youth so silly that he was momentarily under the delusion that one less dish of pasta would be enough to let him show up at Elena’s without his sixty-year-old paunch.